HOUSE OF LORDS

OPINIONS OF THE LORDS OF APPEAL FOR JUDGMENT

IN THE CAUSE

[2006] UKHL 18

LORD NICHOLLS OF BIRKENHEAD

My Lords,

1. This appeal raises questions about the ingredients of the statutory offence of conspiracy and their application in the circumstances of this case. Shorn of its complexities the context is a charge of conspiracy to launder money brought against the appellant, Mr Abdulrahman Saik. He operated a bureau de change in London, near Marble Arch. At his trial he pleaded guilty, subject to the qualification that he did not know the money was the proceeds of crime. He only suspected this was so. This qualified plea was accepted. The issue before your Lordships is whether the offence to which the appellant pleaded guilty in this qualified way is an offence known to law. Reasonable grounds for suspicion are enough for the substantive offence of laundering money. But are they enough for a conspiracy to commit that offence?

2. The mental ingredient in the statutory offence of conspiracy has given rise to difficulty. Some of the case law is confusing, and the academic commentators do not always speak with one voice. The best way to tackle this conundrum is to consider first the ingredients of criminal conspiracy, then apply this approach to a conspiracy to commit the substantive offence of laundering, and finally consider the complication introduced by the form of the plea entered by the appellant.

The statutory offence of criminal conspiracy

3. The Criminal Law Act 1977 redefined conspiracy and put it on a statutory footing. The offence-creating provision is section 1(1). So far as material for present purposes section 1(1), as substituted by the Criminal Attempts Act 1981, provides:

' if a person agrees with any other person or persons that a course of conduct shall be pursued which, if the agreement is carried out in accordance with their intentions (a) will necessarily amount to or involve the commission of any offence or offences by one or more of the parties to the agreement he is guilty of conspiracy to commit the offence or offences in question.'

The offence therefore lies in making an agreement. Implicitly, the subsection requires also that the parties intend to carry out their agreement. The offence is complete at that stage. The offence is complete even if the parties do not carry out their agreement. The offence is complete even if the substantive offence is not thereafter committed by any of the conspirators or by anyone else.

4. Thus under this subsection the mental element of the offence, apart from the mental element involved in making an agreement, comprises the intention to pursue a course of conduct which will necessarily involve commission of the crime in question by one or more of the conspirators. The conspirators must intend to do the act prohibited by the substantive offence. The conspirators' state of mind must also satisfy the mental ingredients of the substantive offence. If one of the ingredients of the substantive offence is that the act is done with a specific intent, the conspirators must intend to do the prohibited act and must intend to do the prohibited act with the prescribed intent. A conspiracy to wound with intent to do grievous bodily harm contrary to section 18 of the Offences of the Person Act 1861 requires proof of an intention to wound with the intent of doing grievous bodily harm. The position is the same if the prescribed state of mind regarding the consequence of the prohibited act is recklessness. Damaging property, being reckless as to whether life is endangered thereby, is a criminal offence: Criminal Damage Act 1971, section 1(2). Conspiracy to commit this offence requires proof of an intention to damage property, and to do so recklessly indifferent to whether this would endanger life.

5. An intention to do a prohibited act is within the scope of section 1(1) even if the intention is expressed to be conditional on the happening, or non-happening, of some particular event. The question always is whether the agreed course of conduct, if carried out in accordance with the parties' intentions, would necessarily involve an offence. A conspiracy to rob a bank tomorrow if the coast is clear when the conspirators reach the bank is not, by reason of this qualification, any less a conspiracy to rob. In the nature of things, every agreement to do something in the future is hedged about with conditions, implicit if not explicit. In theory if not in practice, the condition could be so far-fetched that it would cast doubt on the genuiness of a conspirator's expressed intention to do an unlawful act. If I agree to commit an offence should I succeed in climbing Mount Everest without the use of oxygen, plainly I have no intention to commit the offence at all. Fanciful cases apart, the conditional nature of the agreement is insufficient to take the conspiracy outside section 1(1).

6. Section 1(2) qualifies the scope of the offence created by section 1(1). This subsection is more difficult. Its essential purpose is to ensure that strict liability and recklessness have no place in the offence of conspiracy. The subsection provides:

'Where liability for any offence may be incurred without knowledge on the part of the person committing it of any particular fact or circumstance necessary for the commission of the offence, a person shall nevertheless not be guilty of conspiracy to commit that offence by virtue of subsection (1) above unless he and at least one other party to the agreement intend or know that that fact or circumstance shall or will exist at the time when the conduct constituting the offence is to take place.'

7. Under this subsection conspiracy involves a third mental element: intention or knowledge that a fact or circumstances necessary for the commission of the substantive offence will exist. Take the offence of handling stolen goods. One of its ingredients is that the goods must have been stolen. That is a fact necessary for the commission of the offence. Section 1(2) requires that the conspirator must intend or know that this fact will exist when the conduct constituting the offence takes place.

8. It follows from this requirement of intention or knowledge that proof of the mental element needed for the commission of a substantive offence will not always suffice on a charge of conspiracy to commit that offence. In respect of a material fact or circumstance conspiracy has its own mental element. In conspiracy this mental element is set as high as 'intend or know'. This subsumes any lesser mental element, such as suspicion, required by the substantive offence in respect of a material fact or circumstances. In this respect the mental element of conspiracy is distinct from and supersedes the mental element in the substantive offence. When this is so, the lesser mental element in the substantive offence becomes otiose on a charge of conspiracy. It is an immaterial averment. To include it in the particulars of the offence of conspiracy is potentially confusing and should be avoided.

9. The phrase 'fact or circumstance necessary for the commission of the offence' is opaque. Difficulties have sometimes arisen in its application. The key seems to lie in the distinction apparent in the subsection between 'intend or know' on the one hand and any particular 'fact or circumstance necessary for the commission of the offence' on the other hand. The latter is directed at an element of the actus reus of the offence. A mental element of the offence is not itself a 'fact or circumstance' for the purposes of the subsection.

10. This contrast can be illustrated by the offence of entering into an arrangement whereby the retention by another person (A) of A's proceeds of crime is facilitated, knowing or suspecting A has been engaged in crime: section 93A of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, now repealed. The requirement that the defendant must know or suspect A's criminal history is an element of the offence, but it is a mental element. The need for the defendant to have this state of mind is not a fact or circumstance within section 1(2). Another ingredient of the offence is that the property involved must be the proceeds of crime. That is a fact necessary for the commission of the offence and section 1(2) applies to that fact. The contrary analysis in R v Sakavickas [2005] 1WLR 857, 863, para 17, was erroneous.

11. The genesis of this feature of the legislation lies in the ingredients of the common law offence of conspiracy as enunciated by your Lordships' House in R v Churchill [1967] 2 AC 224. There the defendant was charged with the common law offence of conspiracy to commit a statutory offence. The statutory offence was an offence of strict liability. The House held that the conspirator was not guilty of the offence of conspiracy if on the facts known to him the act he agreed to do was lawful.

12. This principle was accepted by the Law Commission in its subsequent report on Conspiracy and Criminal Law Reform (Law Com no 76) para 1.39:

'What the prosecution ought to have to prove is that the defendant agreed with another person that a course of conduct should be pursued which would result, if completed, in the commission of a criminal offence, and further that they both knew any facts they would need to know to make them aware that the agreed course of conduct would result in the commission of the offence.'

This report led to the enactment of the Criminal Law Act 1977.

13. The rationale underlying this approach is that conspiracy imposes criminal liability on the basis of a person's intention. This is a different harm from the commission of the substantive offence. So it is right that the intention which is being criminalised in the offence of conspiracy should itself be blameworthy. This should be so, irrespective of the provisions of the substantive offence in that regard.

14. Against that background I turn to some issues concerning the scope and effect of section 1(2). The starting point is to note that this relieving provision is not confined to substantive offences attracting strict liability. The subsection does not so provide. Nor would such an interpretation of the subsection make sense. It would make no sense for section 1(2) to apply, and require proof of intention or knowledge, where liability for the substantive offence is absolute but not where the substantive offence has built into it a mental ingredient less than knowledge, such as suspicion.

15. So much is clear. A more difficult question arises where an ingredient of the substantive offence is that the defendant must know of a material fact or circumstance. On its face section 1(2) does not apply in this case. The opening words of section 1(2), on their face, limit the scope of the subsection to cases where a person may commit an offence without knowledge of a material fact or circumstance.

16. Plainly Parliament did not intend that a person would be liable for conspiracy where he lacks the knowledge required to commit the substantive offence. That could not be right. Parliament could not have intended such an absurd result. Rather, the assumption underlying section 1(2) is that, where knowledge of a material fact is an ingredient of a substantive offence, knowledge of that fact is also an ingredient of the crime of conspiring to commit the substantive offence.

17. There are two ways this result might be achieved. One is simply to treat section 1(2) as inapplicable in this type of case. This would mean that the knowledge requirement in the substantive offence would survive as a requirement which must also be satisfied in respect of a conspiracy. In the same way as a conspirator must intend to do the prohibited act with any specific intent required by the substantive offence, so he must intend to do the prohibited act having the knowledge required by the substantive offence. Accordingly, on this analysis, where knowledge of a fact is an ingredient of the substantive offence, section 1(2) is not needed.

18. The other route is to adopt the interpretation of section 1(2) suggested by Sir John Smith. The suggestion is that section 1(2) applies in such a case despite the opening words of the subsection. Section 1(2) is to be read as applicable even 'where liability for an offence may be incurred without knowledge [etc]'. It is difficult to see what other function the word 'nevertheless' has in the subsection. This may seem a slender peg on which to hang a conclusion of any substance, but it is enough: see 'Some Answers' [1978] Crim LR 210.

19. The first route accords more easily with the language of section 1(2), but I prefer the second route for the following reason. A conspiracy is looking to the future. It is an agreement about future conduct. When the agreement is made the 'particular fact or circumstance necessary for the commission' of the substantive offence may not have happened. So the conspirator cannot be said to know of that fact or circumstance at that time. Nor, if the happening of the fact or circumstance is beyond his control, can it be said that the conspirator will know of that fact or circumstance.

20. Section 1(2) expressly caters for this situation. The conspirator must 'intend or know' that this fact or circumstance 'shall or will exist' when the conspiracy is carried into effect. Although not the happiest choice of language, 'intend' is descriptive of a state of mind which is looking to the future. This is to be contrasted with the language of substantive offences. Generally, references to 'knowingly' or the like in substantive offences are references to a past state of affairs. No doubt this language could be moulded appropriately where the offence charged is conspiracy. But the more direct and satisfactory route is to regard section 1(2) as performing in relation to a conspiracy the function which words such as 'knowingly' perform in relation to the substantive offence. That approach accords better with what must be taken to have been the parliamentary intention on how the phrase 'intend or know' in section 1(2) would operate in this type of case. Thus on a charge of conspiracy to handle stolen property where the property has not been identified when the agreement is made, the prosecution must prove that the conspirator intended that the property which was the subject of the conspiracy would be stolen property.

21. In my view, therefore, the preferable interpretation of section 1(2) is that the subsection applies to all offences. It applies whenever an ingredient of an offence is the existence of a particular fact or circumstance. The subsection applies to that ingredient.

The Criminal Justice Act 1988, section 93C

22. I must now take this a step further and confront another difficulty. I can do this most readily by reference to the substantive offence relevant in the present case:section 93C of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. This section was inserted into the 1988 Act by section 31 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993. It has now been superseded. Section 93C(2) provided:

'A person is guilty of an offence if, knowing or having reasonable grounds to suspect that any property is, or in whole or in part directly or indirectly represents, another person's proceeds of criminal conduct, he-

(a) conceals or disguises that property; or

(b) converts or transfers that property or removes it from the jurisdiction,

for the purpose of assisting any person to avoid prosecution for an offence to which this Part of this Act applies or the making or enforcement in his case of a confiscation order.'

23. The acts prohibited by this offence are listed in paragraphs (a) and (b): concealing or disguising the property, or converting or transferring the property or taking it abroad. Thus a conspiracy to commit this offence involves an agreement to do one or more of these acts. Further, the agreement must be an agreement to do one or more of these acts for one or more of the stated purposes. Another ingredient of the substantive offence is that the property in question must emanate from a crime: R v Montila [2004] 1 WLR 3141. The criminal provenance of the property is a fact necessary for the commission of the offence. This fact falls within section 1(2). So, applying section 1(2) to that fact, the prosecution must prove the conspirator intended or knew that fact would exist when the conspiracy was carried out. Hence, where the property has not been identified when the conspiracy agreement is reached, the prosecution must prove the conspirator intended that the property would be the proceeds of criminal conduct.

24. If these ingredients are established the offence of conspiracy is made out. In this type of case, namely, where the conspiracy related to unidentified property, there is no question of having to prove that the property was the proceeds of criminal conduct. In this type of case that is not possible. It is not possible because the property which was the subject of the conspiracy had not been identified when the conspiracy was entered into. Despite this, the crime of conspiracy will be committed. It will be committed even if the property never materialises or never exists. The observation in paragraph 147 in the court's judgment in R v Ali [2006] 2 WLR 316, 351, should not be read as applying in this type of case.

25. What, however, if the property to which the conspiracy relates was specifically identified when the conspirators made their agreement? In that event the prosecution must prove the conspirators 'knew' the property was the proceeds of crime. This is the next point of difficulty in the interpretation of section 1(2). Does 'know' in this context have the meaning attributed to it in the Montila case when considering the substantive offence? If it does, the identified property to which the conspiracy related must actually be or represent the proceeds of crime, and the conspirator must be aware of this. Or does 'know' in this context mean 'believe', as seems to be suggested in R v Ali [2006] 2 WLR 316, 335, para 98? On the ordinary use of language a person cannot 'know' whether property is the proceeds of crime unless he participated in the crime. He can only believe this is so, on the basis of what he has been told. Adopting this approach would mean that, so far as section 93C is concerned, equating knowledge with belief in the case of identified property would achieve a measure of symmetry with the requirement of intention in the case of unidentified property. It would mean that in both cases what matters is the conspirator's state of mind: the actual provenance of the property would not be material.